


Good Intentions

by Cernunnos



Category: Hanna Is Not A Boy's Name
Genre: Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Original Character Death(s)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-05
Updated: 2014-12-05
Packaged: 2018-02-28 05:57:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,854
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2721305
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cernunnos/pseuds/Cernunnos
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Even though Ples has long been disowned by his father, he returns to England to attend the man's funeral. Afterward, an unexpected apology from his step-mother dredges up terrible memories, and leads to a reconciliation neither of them expected.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Good Intentions

The funeral had been an appropriately somber affair, and in spite of his step-mother’s invitation to sit with her and his half-siblings in the front pew, Ples had politely declined and stood awkwardly in the back of the room. It was difficult enough to suffer the twins’ disdain without being subject to scrutiny by friends of his father’s family. He had viewed the corpse long before people began streaming in, and knew well enough that his emotional detachment could be misinterpreted in many insulting ways.  
  
It had been more than twenty years since he had laid eyes on Cecil Tibenoch, and it had been obvious that old age had not treated the man well. Disease had wasted his strong body, and the black hair that Ples remembered had thinned and greyed to an ugly steel color. Even the placid expression the mortician had given him was not enough to lessen the deep furrows that marred his brow. To the accountant, what lie in that sleek ebony casket was not his father – just the shell of what once was.  
  
He dutifully attended his step-mother and her children to the graveside, but did not leave with them once that service had ended. No doubt, they would entertain guests for a few hours, and there were few places within the estate’s walls in which he felt comfortable enough to sequester himself for that long. Instead, he lingered for a while to visit his mother’s grave – something that he truly regretted not doing since he had left the country as a young man – before treating himself to a coffee.  
  
When he did deign to return, the manor’s looming stone exterior left him feeling particularly cold and unwelcome. Even the windows – elegantly arched in gothic style – seemed more like dark, frowning maws meant to drive him away. It was one thing to visit just long enough to attend the funeral, but now that the ceremony was over, he had little business left to warrant staying.  
  
The front had been left unlocked; however, when he entered, all was exceedingly quiet. He had expected to at least hear Augustine and Camilla moving about to wait on their grieving mother, but the only footsteps that echoed about the interior were his own. Had they gone out? Had something happened? Worrying his lower lip, he ventured further inside – padding as quietly as possible along the uncarpeted floors.  
  
“Ples? Is that you?”  
  
He flinched and darted his gaze toward the open parlor doors. He didn’t want to go in there – had avoided the room since he’d arrived. For a moment, he could only stand paralyzed and stare dumbly before finally swallowing the lump that threatened to form in his throat.  
  
“Y-yes, Ma’am.”  
  
Much to his relief, rather than call him in, his step-mother soon emerged. Still clad in the black affair she’d worn to the funeral, her slender face was ruddy from crying and the thin lines around her mouth and eyes seemed a bit more prominent. It struck him, then, just how young she had been when his father had married her; there was little more than twenty year’s difference between her age and his own.  
  
“Augustine and Camilla have left for a while to attend to their own families,” she murmured. “I shouldn’t expect them back until much later this evening, if at all tonight. You must be weary, but… I would very much like to speak with you while we are afforded the privacy. Would you join me for some tea in the kitchen?”  
  
He could hardly find it in himself to refuse, and so he quietly followed her toward the back of the home. The kitchen was, he supposed, one of the most modern interior spaces (outside the bathrooms). His father had, at some point, renovated the area so that his step-mother could have more than enough room to prepare for entertaining dozens of guests at once.   
  
Very little was spoken between the pair for several minutes, save when Elizabeth asked the younger man what blend he preferred. It was only once they had settled down at the small breakfast table that she began.  
  
“I have…spent many weeks planning exactly what I would say to you once you arrived – if you arrived. It’s all gone to waste, I’m afraid,” she chuckled past the lip of her cup, not quite daring to look up at the man’s face.  
  
He frowned a bit, brows furrowing in confusion. “What do you mean?”  
  
Tired blue eyes remained trained on the table. “When I married your father… I wasn’t ready to be a mother; I was barely an adult, myself. I certainly didn’t know how to be a mother to a child with…your particular challenges. The entire situation was awkward and a bit…well, frightening. I could never tell what you thought of me, and I didn’t want you to think that I meant to replace your mother, but I didn’t… I didn’t know what to do with you, Ples. That’s why I left you to Cecil so often, and… I truly regret having done that. If I could go back and do it all over again, I like to think I might have made more of an effort to help you when you needed it.”  
  
Pursing his lips, Ples shrugged his shoulders with a sigh. “My peculiarities were not well-known at the time. I cannot blame you for not knowing when no one else did, either. My own mother knew little better than you.”  
  
“Frances never allowed your father to talk of institutionalizing you, either,” she quipped back. “She spent time with you; she did what she knew to do. That is more than I can say for myself.”  
  
“You make her out to be a saint. She was hardly without fault.”  
  
“ _Ples_!” The exclamation and sudden grip on his free hand caused him to flinch back a bit. “Holding her melancholy against her is just as awful as someone holding your own peculiarities against you. I will not excuse her behavior towards yourself and Cecil during those last months. That being said, she was more mother to you than I ever was.”   
  
‘Peculiarities’ indeed. The sudden admission of what he assumed must be some self-imposed guilt was peculiar in of itself, and he wasn’t sure how he was expected to respond. Brows knit and lips pulled into a tight frown, he fell silent for a few brief moments. “For whom do you seek my forgiveness? Her or yourself? I’ve already said that I don’t blame you. I did not come here with the intention of placing blame on anyone.”  
  
The hand over his own did not move – much to his discomfort. While his mother had foisted much intimacy on him in his youth in an attempt to teach him some semblance of ‘normal’ behavior, Elizabeth had always been distant and had only offered the occasional awkward embrace or fleeting pat to the head.  
  
Her free hand rose to her own face in an attempt to obscure her own distress; however, the faint tears that trickled down her cheeks were still visible. Their presence made the younger man’s gut clench. “I so wish I could explain it in a way you could understand, Ples… I haven’t just failed you; I’ve failed my own children. I’ve failed as a mother and a wife. I allowed your father to poison the twins against you; don’t think for a moment I haven’t heard what they’ve said to you these past few days. I wish I could say that, in his own way, your father did love you, but I cannot. I could never dream of trying to right the wrongs done to you over the course of your lifetime… I fully intend to give you right to first choice in any belongings within this house – especially those that belonged to your mother, but… Even that will never be enough. In a way, it feels cheap and petty… As if I intend to pay you off for having endured so much. I have never felt so helpless to do anything meaningful for you.”  
  
He was beginning to understand more than she knew. Failure and helplessness were two feelings he was well acquainted with. He would never know what it felt like to fail a child – his own or otherwise – but he had known, even in his youth, that he had failed his mother and father. He could never be the son they had wanted. He knew the helplessness that came with being chained to one’s own demons. The discomfort was mounting with every passing moment, and he finally snatched his hand out from under hers to tuck it close to his lean chest.  
  
He wasn’t sure how to respond, and instinctively muttered a quiet, “It seems a bit presumptuous to believe I would want her things…” It was not his intention to seem ungrateful for the offer, but coming from someone who had always known the truth behind his mother’s demise and had played a part in the lies that surrounded it for decades, it was difficult to accept.  
  
Elizabeth’s fingers jerked a bit when he pulled away from her; though, she could not say it surprised or disappointed her. That he’d allowed her to touch him for even that short while was enough. What left his mouth next, however, made her heart sink. “She loved you dearly, Ples. I would have thought you might at least want something of her.”  
  
“I cannot say I know much about ‘love’, but blowing out the back of her skull does not strike me as ‘loving’,” he retorted evenly. “She _left_ me. When she lost her last chance at a normal, functioning child, she _abandoned_ me. I was _broken_. I was something to be _ashamed_ of. I was _never_ good enough.”  
  
Elizabeth could not help but bow up a bit the more her stepson spoke. His tone, to her, reeked of bitterness, and while it was not unheard of for a child to blame themselves for their parents’ unhappiness, she did not appreciate his implied accusations of willful abandonment.  
  
“Melancholy is a vicious, corrosive disease, Ples. She lost a daughter, and she was losing you. You said yourself that your peculiarities were not well known; she had exhausted every resource she knew and nothing seemed to work. The helplessness I feel must pale in comparison to what she felt! And as much as I loved your father – God knows I did – he was not a faultless man… Not having even her husband to turn to for solace? Feeling that he must have blamed her… That she had failed him and you? Is it so impossible to think that she must have felt you both would have been better off without her?”  
  
He wanted to say that it was. He wanted to say that he had never thought of that same justification in defense of his own toxic thoughts, but he couldn’t. He couldn’t, and it made him sick to think of it. Where Lucien had always held enmity for their father – had spent years stewing over every hateful thing Cecil had ever said or done to them – Ples had only recently begun to struggle with his conflicted feelings over their mother. It was difficult to piece together real memories out of the false ones his mind had created, and while the good ones still seemed to outnumber the bad, the bad ones carried so much more weight – in part, he imagined, because while the events had happened so long ago, having just remembered them only renewed the damage.  
  
In a way, it was very much like how he felt when he first realized Lucien’s true intentions. The hateful monster that had lived inside of him for decades had been a sociopathic sword and shield whose sole purpose was to protect his vessel and the fragile sanity of the man who owned it. Having internalized so much hatred for his other half, it had taken Ples months to forgive the other man and mend their relationship. Now, though, he found himself struggling to be angry with someone who he had previously felt nothing but affection for. He wanted to hate his mother for taking her life, but at every turn, he was being confronted with all the good she had done before the incident.  
  
It was frustrating, and he was so wrapped up in his own muddled thoughts that he hadn’t really noticed when his vision had started blurring. “S-she _left_ me,” he reiterated, his voice cracking faintly. “She left me with him! If I hadn’t seen her, then I w-wouldn’t have… I wouldn’t have gotten _worse_!”  
  
“Maybe not,” the older woman sighed. “Hind-sight is twenty-twenty, Ples, and the road to Hell is paved with good intentions.”  
  
Silence quickly descended upon them again – only interrupted by Ples’s miserable sniffling as he tried to reign himself in. Elizabeth, for her part, was entirely lost as to what to do or say to her step-son. She’d never been able to console him in the past during his fits, and while this was an entirely different sort of situation, past experience left her unsure of herself.  
  
After a few moments, she pushed her seat back and rose – grabbing her cup to fill it with a bit more tea. “Perhaps today was not the best time to bring this all up… I apologize,” she murmured.  
  
“Don’t…” Sliding his glasses off, he wiped haphazardly at his face to clear away the tears that had wet his cheeks. “I… How could you love a man like him? Knowing what he’d done and what he intended?” After all, it seemed as though they had done away with the notion of not speaking ill of the dead, so he might as well ask, and her answer was quite relevant to his own current dilemma.  
  
She did not answer right away, or even turn around. Instead, her slender shoulders sank and she fiddled with her drink for a moment while searching for the proper words.  
  
“Love is…a complicated thing, Ples. We do not really choose who we love … But loving a person does not mean condoning everything that person does. I will be honest, if the times and circumstances had been different, I might have sought divorce after the first few years, but… Even if I had, I cannot say with certainty that I would not still have loved your father. I know…you did not see what kindness there was in him. To hear him talk of you, I can’t help but think he blamed you for what happened to your mother… But he was good to me. He provided for me and the twins, and as far as I know, he did the same for your mother.” She paused and turned to face him, worrying her lower lip a bit. “Trying to give you a list of reasons… It all sounds so petty. It would sound petty if I tried to explain why I love anyone – even why I love you and Augustine and Camilla. I don’t approve of everything you three do or say, and there have been times in which I’ve been frustrated or angry with one or another of you, but I love you none the less.”  
  
He had yet to replace his glasses, and instead listened to her with his forehead propped against a loose fist. While he couldn’t really be sure his step-mother loved him or not, he had little doubt that she loved her own children – and so a fraction of her assurances were taken to heart – enough so to prompt another, quiet query. “S-so… You could be angry with someone…and hate something th-they’ve done…but s-still love them?”  
  
“Of course you could.” It was heartbreaking to think that the man had somehow navigated forty-eight years without knowing that answer… That his beliefs had been so painted in child-like black and white.  
  
“I don’t miss him.” The admission was clipped, not in anger, but so that he could swallow down the lump in his throat. “But… I miss her. C-could I… Could I really take some of her things back with me?”  
  
Elizabeth closed their distance, then, with slow, deliberate steps, and set her cup aside on the table. “Whatever you want of it, Ples,” she murmured.  
  
A hesitant hand reached out to gently rest atop his head. When he did not shy away, she loosely wrapped her other arm around his shoulders and pulled him into what she was sure to be a brief embrace.  
  
It was difficult not to hunch up a bit, but Ples managed to lean his head against the woman’s breast and allowed his eyes to fall shut. “I think… I think I may have missed you as well,” he whispered.  
  
If that were the closest she ever came to the man expressing any affection for her, then Elizabeth would accept and cherish that moment for the rest of her life. Carding her fingers through his hair – he had gone white so young! – she offered him a soft smile. “I’ve missed you, too, Ples.”

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> As mentioned in previous work, I write Ples as suffering from Dissociative Identity Disorder (Lucien being his 'alternate personality') - the implied onset being his discovering his mother's body after her suicide. The "peculiarities" mentioned referring to Ples's childhood refer to his showing symptoms of Autism Spectrum Disorders, at which time little was known about them.


End file.
